Articles by Ed Hooper

Welcome to www.aidsorigins.com, the site hosted by Ed Hooper that seeks to provide impartial and uncensored information about the origins of the AIDS pandemic. For a brief introduction to the origins of AIDS debate, see below:

There would be no need for this site to exist, were it not for the fact that it is increasingly obvious that a small group of eminent and influential mainstream scientists are willing to countenance only one version of events about how AIDS began - a version which is scientifically and historically flawed, but which serves the interests of certain powerful political groupings, and a large portion of the "vaccination fraternity".

I believe that this official version of events is wrong.

In 1999 I wrote a book, The River, which proposed the hypothesis that AIDS might be iatrogenic (caused by physicians), and that scientists might have unwittingly started the pandemic through an experimental oral polio vaccine (OPV) administered in central Africa in the 1950s. That book touched more buttons than I had anticipated, for it sparked a major cover-up among those who had been involved with making the vaccine, and among powerful interest groups within the medical community.

The attempted whitewash persuaded me to continue my researches. I have now been exclusively researching AIDS for 20 years, and its origins for 16. And whereas I was 95% persuaded of the merits of the vaccine theory when The River was published in 1999, I am now (in 2006) 99.9% persuaded that this is how AIDS began.

Synopsis

a) The latest paper by Beatrice Hahn's team (B. F. Keele, B. H. Hahn et al: "Chimpanzee Reservoirs of Pandemic and Nonpandemic HIV-1") [Reference 1] features claims that they have discovered the source of pandemic HIV-1, the "AIDS virus".

b) However, on the basis of the evidence presented, this claim is unsafe. In fact, more than that, it represents a rash over-extrapolation.

c) The reasons for rejecting Hahn's claim include the following: (i) less than 1 in 200 of the chimp troops in this part of Africa have thus far been sampled for SIV; (ii) in reality, the new chimp viruses she has found fall far short of being "dead ringers" for pandemic HIV-1, as has been claimed; (iii) there are close physical and biomedical similarities between Pan troglodytes troglodytes (Ptt) chimps and Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii (Pts) chimps, which some believe should be regrouped into a single subspecies; (iv) members of some groups of Ptt cluster genetically with Pts, and vice versa; (v) despite their claims to the contrary, Hahn and co-authors have not established that Ptt (rather than Pts) represents the reservoir of pandemic HIV-1; (vi) furthermore, the closest primate virus ancestor to pandemic HIV-1 may have existed in a chimp troop that is now extinct.

d) The true reason why it is so important to Hahn's group to establish the Pan troglodytes troglodytes subspecies of chimpanzee as the reservoir of pandemic HIV-1 is that they believe that this refutes the OPV/AIDS theory, which proposes that AIDS began as a result of chimpanzee experiments conducted in Stanleyville, Belgian Congo, in the late 1950s.

e) However, their latest findings do not disprove the OPV/AIDS theory. For a long time, there has been substantial anecdotal and circumstantial evidence that at least some Ptt chimps were present at Stanleyville and/or the nearby chimp camp at Lindi. But a recently-unearthed Belgian article from 1965 proves that the Stanleyville doctors were working with at least one Ptt chimp in early 1960, and perhaps in 1959. Co-caging and group caging were routine at the holding centres at both Lindi and Stanleyville, meaning that viruses could have spread from this Ptt (or similar animals) to other primates (Pts and bonobos) housed in these centres.

f) Furthermore, it is far easier to postulate Ptt chimps, including chimps from south-eastern Cameroon, ending up in the huge holding centres at Lindi and Stanleyville than it is to postulate a human infectee moving from Cameroon to Leopoldville, allowing AIDS to spawn there - and only there.

g) It is also worth emphasising that because of recombination between SIV strains, the origin of pandemic HIV-1 does not automatically require the involvement of the closest viral ancestor genetically. [See below for further details.]

h) There are multiple problems with the latest Hahn/Sharp scenario of how the AIDS pandemic might have started in Leopoldville (over 600 miles by river from her alleged chimpanzee "source"). By contrast, the OPV/AIDS hypothesis is inconvenienced by none of these.

i) The discovery that Ptt were used in the Stanleyville experiments has more significance for the origin of AIDS than Hahn's latest data from Cameroon. Once again, the claims by Hahn and her buddies that "the OPV theory has been laid to rest" are revealed as empty bluster.

Sadly, some scientists seem to believe that by repeating an untruth often enough, you can persuade the world that it is actually true.

One such group of scientists is that led by Dr Beatrice Hahn of the University of Alabama, whose members seem to be much more interested in trying to earn themselves grants and glittering prizes than in actually helping us understand how the AIDS pandemic began.

Background

The following article was originally written in December 2005, and represents the draft of a letter which I had intended to send to Emerging Infectious Diseases in response to an article published in that month's issue of the journal by a team led by doctors Nathan Wolfe and Donald Burke from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

In February 2006, an important new book about AIDS in Africa appeared. Entitled "The African AIDS Epidemic: A History", and published by James Currey, it is written by John Iliffe, who is Professor of African History at the University of Cambridge.

I recently heard from a Cambridge undergraduate about the impending publication of your new book about the history of AIDS in Africa. I immediately ordered it through Amazon and it arrived a few days ago.

Introduction

February 2006. In recent days there has been much press coverage about new claims by American, British and Belgian scientists that they have discovered the geographical source of AIDS. These researchers have apparently detected simian immunodeficiency viruses (SIVs) that are closely related to the AIDS pandemic virus, HIV-1, in the stools of wild chimpanzees living in the very south-eastern corner of Cameroon, in western Africa.